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Hundreds of fans funnel hot air from the computer servers into a cooling unit to be recirculated at a Google data center in Mayes County, Okla. The green lights are the server status LEDs reflecting from the front of the servers.Photo: AP Photo/Google/Connie Zhou

WASHINGTON — A surveillance review board has recommended that the U.S. government stop its bulk storage of Americans’ phone and Internet communications.

The board has also recommended tighter controls over the U.S. National Security Agency, which for years has been secretly collecting the bulk data.

“The current storage by the government of bulk meta-data creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy and civil liberty,” the report by the Review Group on intelligence and Communications Technologies, states.

“We recommend that Congress should end such storage and transition to a system in which such metadata is held privately for the government to query when necessary for national security purposes.”

While the 40 recommendations in the 308-page report might appear sweeping, they do not actually curtail the overall data collection and combing ability of the nation’s leading signals intelligence group.

Nothing in the report recommends they stop the practice of indiscriminate, bulk collection of domestic and foreign phone and Internet records. The report simply recommends they do it at arms length and suggests stronger executive oversight and greater transparency.

It does not, for instance, suggest that the current databases be destroyed, but rather parked off campus with private third parties.

“This approach would allow the government access to the relevant information when such access is justified, and thus protect national security without unnecessarily threatening privacy and liberty,” report says.

Where it does show teeth is in the tightening of the authorization process and in the reorganization of the NSA, which critics have charged has become a rogue elephant. Critics claim that its 35,000 employees at its Fort Meade, Md., headquarters, plus its numerous private contractors are out of control.

The report recommends the NSA should be clearly identified as a foreign intelligence agency and its next director should be a civilian. The current director is an admiral.

“To reduce the risk of unjustified, unnecessary, or excessive surveillance in foreign nations, including collection on foreign leaders, we recommend that the President should create a new process, requiring highest-level approval of all sensitive intelligence requirements and the methods that the Intelligence Community will use to meet them,” the report states.

The report also recommends that Congress pass a law authorizing telephone, Internet and other communications providers to disclose publically all court orders that direct them to provide bulk data information to the government. At the moment, target companies are bound by court-ordered secrecy.

In addition, the government should disclose to the public “on a regular basis” information about specific data collection programs, but only for programs that are “unclassified” or have been declassified.

The authors of the report, who are intelligence veterans, also addressed the surveillance of foreign citizens and leaders. Leaked documents indicate the U.S. has been collecting phone data on foreign leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazilian President Delma Rousseff.

The authors recommend that data collection on foreigners should be authorized only by a law of Congress or by the president and that its purpose should be exclusively for nation security and not for “theft of trade secrets” or for “obtaining commercial gain for domestic industries.”

The key issue, the authors say, is the ability to protect national security while maintaining the essential democratic principles of freedom, civil rights and privacy.

“The rise of modern technologies makes it all the more important that democratic nations respect people’s fundamental right to privacy, which is a defining part of individual security and personal liberty,” the report says.

U.S. President Barack Obama set up the review panel in August after NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked to the media secret NSA documents that proved the agency has been collecting bulk communications data on pretty well every American.

The White House originally had promised to make the report public in January. Obama chose, however, to release it immediately after a district court judge ruled Monday that the practice is “almost Orwellian” in size and is likely illegal.

Obama has claimed that he probably won’t change in any substantive way the NSA surveillance program. The cautious recommendations of the authors appear to give him plenty of leeway.

He has argued that because the data collected is restricted to phone numbers, times and places of calls and their duration, and does not include names of individuals or content, the program is not an infringement of privacy.

According to Snowden’s documents, the NSA also collects email, Twitter and Facebook records.

Civil liberties and conservative groups claim the bulk collection is a violation of privacy and of the fourth amendment of the U.S. Constitution forbidding unreasonable search and seizure. They have sued to end the practice.